There’s lots of talk recently about the wealth of Jeff Bezos. There are maps comparing his wealth to entire countries, a “You are Jeff Bezos” game where you can spend his money on different things - like paying their fair-share of taxes, and a graphic that puts his wealth in perspective. A recurring point is that most people simply cannot fathom the amount of money he has. The number is $150 billion. My favorite attempt to bring the number into human terms is Quartz’s article, “The average US worker would need 10 times the length of all human history to earn as much as Jeff Bezos”. This beautifully captures the point that someone does not simply earn or work for such an amount of money, but rather captures it. We, at degrowth.info, thought a similar calculation would be interesting. We wanted to know how many humble (but hopefully useful) projects like ours Jeff Bezos’ wealth could pay for. In case you haven’t heard already, degrowth.info is improving its site to better support the degrowth community and improve the usability of the platform – this will cost 7,500€.
In his welcome address at the opening plenary of the 5th International Degrowth Conference, Federico Demaria from Research and Degrowth made explicitly clear that immigrants, refugees and their struggles must be integral part of the degrowth community: "Refugees and the other oppressed shall always be kept in mind while imagining degrowth and the socio-ecological transformation we are walking. ...
By Panos Petridis and Angelos Varvarousis “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will” (A. Gramsci) We might err, but we believe that in the night of the elections in January 2015 a symbolic “tipping point” has been reached in Greece, signifying a break with a one way pre-dictated future, and adding vital fresh wind by pointing to the possibility of multiple al...
By Chris Ward Despite attending the conference, not everyone will fully understand what ‘Degrowth’ is, or the multitude of related terms that will be mentioned during the conference. Thankfully the first session on the schedule, offered by Federico Demaria and Giacomo D´Alisa was ideally suited for getting your knowledge up to scratch. Judging by audience responses to the question “What ...
